4/5 ⭐️ - Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece
This book is a good history of publishing and sharing on the Web, particularly through blogging, and how related web technologies evolved. It also places them in the context of social media. The author Manton, creator of the thoughtful service Micro.blog, drives home the point that blogs contribute to the Web by being independent, openly connected without any giant centralized third party platform in between. If you want to understand why having a personal website or blog on your own domain—your own digital house address—is linked to saving the Web itself, read this book. Some quotes from the book below.
There weren’t enough blogs back in 2002, and there aren’t enough now. I have no doubt that some of the blogs created today will be important in the years ahead, maybe contributing to a debate on politics, or showcasing new writing or art, or serving as an archive that reflects today’s culture. Personal blogs are independent by default. They are separate from any one platform.
The web was always meant to be a read-write medium. Not just browsing, but posting too. When Tim Berners-Lee developed the first web browser on his NeXT workstation, he also developed a way to edit web pages. Tim would write in his book Weaving the Web: My vision was a system in which sharing what you knew or thought should be as easy as learning what someone else knew.
I’m a child of the open Web, and I’m driven by the fact that my blogs help create and sustain that Web itself. I can’t code and I still create the Web. It’s important for more people from all walks of life to actively participate in this shared global resource by looking outside the silos of social media. Which is why I like how Manton emphasizes two things in the book:
- Even micro posts belong on your blog, on the open Web.
Millions of tweets are created every day. These are short posts, links, and photos. If we redirect even a small amount of that effort to instead start with indie microblogs, it will be an explosion of new growth for the open web. It will accelerate the maturation of IndieWeb standards. This is why we should start with short posts. They represent the majority of content on silos like Twitter and Facebook, and they’re easy for anyone to create, without the often daunting task of thinking about a whole web site. With better tools and platforms, people can have their own website as a default outcome when microblogging, rather than as a chore and technical hurdle.
- Owning your place on the Web is not about the technology stack or tools you use but just about having a bunch of words on your domain name. It doesn’t require having any elaborate technical knowledge.
I think in the tech world—and especially as programmers—we tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. We know too much about content ownership, most of it irrelevant for mainstream users. [...] Controlling the writing and photos you post online isn’t about open source or the technical experience to run a server. It’s about using domain names for identity, so that you can move your data in the future without breaking URLs.
I wrote something on the same topic back in 2022, which I’m a little surprised that it has largely stood the test of time.
Overall, I find Indie Microblogging to be a great read for anyone interested or invested in the Web itself.
Social networks come and go. Protocols evolve. What always remains is your blog, based on open standards: HTML, DNS, and IndieWeb formats. It is always the right time to invest in the open web.
